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BusyBox

Collection of Unix commands in a single executable file

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  • 4 chapters

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History

Origins

Originally written by Bruce Perens in 1995 and declared complete for his intended usage in 1996, BusyBox initially aimed to put a complete bootable system on a single floppy disk that would serve both as a rescue disk and as an installer for the Debian distribution. Since that time, it has been extended to become the de facto standard core user space toolset for embedded Linux devices and Linux distribution installers. Since each Linux executable requires several kilobytes of overhead, having the BusyBox program combine over two hundred programs together often saves substantial disk space and system memory.

BusyBox was maintained by Enrique Zanardi and focused on the needs of the Debian boot-floppies installer system until early 1998, when Dave Cinege took it over for the Linux Router Project (LRP). Cinege made several additions, created a modularized build environment, and shifted BusyBox's focus into general high-level embedded systems. As LRP development slowed down in 1999, Erik Andersen, then of Lineo, Inc., took over the project and became the official maintainer between December 1999 and March 2006. During this time the Linux embedded marketplace exploded in growth, and BusyBox matured greatly, expanding both its user base and functionality. Rob Landley became the maintainer in 2005 until late 2006, then Denys Vlasenko took over as the current maintainer.

GPLv2/GPLv3 controversies

In September 2006, after heavy discussions and controversies between project maintainer Rob Landley and Bruce Perens, the BusyBox project decided against adopting the GNU General Public License Version 3 (GPLv3), and announced an intent to have the BusyBox license be GPLv2-only.

Since October 2006, Denys Vlasenko has taken over maintainership of BusyBox from Rob Landley, who has started Toybox, also as a result of the license controversies.

GPL lawsuits

In late 2007, BusyBox also came to prominence for actively prosecuting violations of the terms of its license (the GPL) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

What was claimed to be the first US lawsuit over a GPL violation concerned the use of BusyBox in an embedded device. The lawsuit, case 07-CV-8205, was filed on September 20, 2007, by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) on behalf of Andersen and Landley against Monsoon Multimedia Inc., after BusyBox code was discovered in a firmware upgrade and attempts to contact the company had apparently failed. The case was settled with release of the Monsoon version of the source and payment of an undisclosed amount of money to Andersen and Landley.

On November 21, 2007, the SFLC brought two similar lawsuits on behalf of Andersen and Landley against two more companies, Xterasys (case 07-CV-10455) and High-Gain Antennas (case 07-CV-10456). The Xterasys case was settled on December 17 for release of source code used and an undisclosed payment, and the High-Gain Antennas case on March 6, 2008, for active license compliance and an undisclosed payment. On December 7, 2007, a case was brought against Verizon Communications over its distribution of firmware for Actiontec routers; this case was settled March 17, 2008 on condition of license compliance, appointment of an officer to oversee future compliance with free software licenses, and payment of an undisclosed sum. Further suits were brought on June 9, 2008, against Bell Microproducts (case 08-CV-5270) and SuperMicro (case 08-CV-5269), with the Super Micro case being settled on July 23, 2008. BusyBox and Bell Microproducts also settled out of court on October 17.

On December 14, 2009, a new lawsuit was filed naming fourteen defendants including Best Buy, JVC, Samsung and others. In February 2010 Samsung released its LN52A650 TV firmware under GPLv2, which was used later as a reference by the SamyGO community project.

On about August 3, 2010, BusyBox won from Westinghouse a default judgement of triple damages of $90,000 and lawyers' costs and fees of $47,865, and possession of "presumably a lot of high-def TVs" as infringing equipment in the lawsuit Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al., the GPL infringement case noted in the paragraph above.

No other developers, including original author Bruce Perens and maintainer Dave Cinege, were represented in these actions or party to the settlements. On December 15, 2009, Perens released a statement expressing his unhappiness with some aspects of the legal situation, and in particular alleged that the current BusyBox developers "appear to have removed some of the copyright statements of other BusyBox developers, and appear to have altered license statements".

Toybox controversy

Toybox was started early 2006 under the GPL-2.0-only license by former BusyBox maintainer Rob Landley as a result of the controversies around GPLv3/GPLv2 discussions. At the end of 2011 it was relicensed under the BSD-2-Clause license after the project went dormant. In March 2013, it was relicensed again under the 0BSD license. On January 11, 2012, Tim Bird, a Sony employee, suggested creating an alternative to BusyBox which would not be under the GNU General Public License. He suggested it be based on the dormant Toybox. In January 2012 the proposal of creating a BSD licensed alternative to the GPL licensed BusyBox project drew harsh criticism from Matthew Garrett for taking away the only relevant tool for copyright enforcement of the Software Freedom Conservancy group. The starter of BusyBox based lawsuits, Rob Landley, responded that this was intentional as he came to the conclusion that the lawsuits resulted not in the hoped for positive outcomes and he wanted to stop them "in whatever way I see fit".

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